middle-aged, battered, marked, as we are constantly reminded, by all the after-sense of a career of promiscuous carnal connexions. The hero is a man of letters, a poet. a dramatist of infinite reputation and resource, and their union is steeped to the eyes in the gorgeous medium of Venice, the moods of whose melancholy and the voices of whose past are an active part of the perpetual concert. We see the persons introduced to us yearn and strain to exercise their perceptions and taste their impressions as deeply as possible, conspiring together to interweave them with the pleasures of passion. They 'go in,' as the phrase is, for beauty at any cost-for each other's own to begin with; their creator, in the inspiring quest, presses them hard, and the whole effect becomes for us that of an organised general sacrifice to it and an organised general repudiation of everything else. It is not idle to repeat that the value of the Italian background has, to this end, been inestimable, and that every spark of poetry it had to contribute has been struck from it-with what supreme felicity we perhaps most admiringly learn in 'The Virgins of the Rocks.' To measure the assistance thus rendered, and especially the immense literary lift given, we have only to ask ourselves what appearance any one of the situations presented would have made in almost any Cisalpine or 'northern' frame of circumstance whatever. Supported but by such associations of local or of literary elegance as our comparatively thin resources are able to furnish, the latent weakness in them all, the rock, as to final effect, on which they split, and of which I shall presently speak, would be immeasurably less dissimulated. All this is the lesson of style, by which we here catch a writer in the very act of profiting in a curiously double way. D'Annunzio arrives at it both by expression and by material—that is, by a whole side of the latter; so that with such energy at once and such good fortune it would be odd indeed if he had not come far. It is verily in the very name and interest of beauty, of the lovely impression, that Giorgio Aurispa becomes homicidal in thought and finally in act.

'She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence she would enter into an existence complete and definitive, forsaking forever the infirmity of her weak, luxurious flesh. Destroy

to possess there is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love.'

To these reflections he has been brought by the long, dangerous past which, as the author says, his connexion with his mistress has behind it-a past of recriminations of which the ghosts still walk. 'It dragged behind it, through time, an immense dark net, all full of dead things.' To quote here at all is always to desire to continue, and The Triumph of Death' abounds in the illustrative episodes that are ever made so masterfully concrete. Offering in strictness, incidentally, the only exhibition, in all the five volumes, of a human relation other than the acutely sexual, it deals admirably enough with this opportunity when the hero pays his visit to his provincial parents before settling with his mistress at their hermitage. His people are of ancient race and have been much at their ease; but the home in the old Apulian town, overdarkened by the misdeeds of a demoralised father, is on the verge of ruin, and the dull, mean despair of it all, lighted by outbreaks of helpless rage on the part of the injured mother, is more than the visitor can bear, absorbed as he is in impatiences and concupiscences which make everything else cease to exist for him. His terror of the place and its troubles but exposes, of course, the abjection of his weakness, and the sordid squabbles, the general misery and mediocrity of life that he has to face, constitute precisely, for his personal design, the abhorred challenge of ugliness, the interference of a call other than erotic. He flees before it, leaving it to make shift as it can; but nothing could be more rendered,' in detail, than his overwhelmed vision of it.

So with the other finest passages of the story, notably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long, dusty, dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle-working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude of the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely human, and from which they return, disgusted and appalled, to plunge deeper into consoling but too temporary transports; notably also the incident, masterly in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the whole scene of the small, starved, dead child on the beach, in all the beauty Vol. 199.—No. 398.

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of light and air and view, with the effusions and vociferations and grimnesses round him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old tombs and urns, that quality and dignity of looming larger which a great feeling on the painter's part ever gives to small things. With this ampler truth the last page of the book is above all invested, the description of the supreme moment-for some time previous creeping nearer and nearer—at which the delirious protagonist beguiles his vaguely but not fully suspicious companion into coming out with him toward the edge of a dizzy place over the sea, where, suddenly, he grasps her for her doom, and the sense of his awful intention, flashing a light back as into their monstrous past, makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the first betrayal, panting and trembling.

""Are you crazy?" she cried with wrath in her throat. "Are you crazy?" But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as she felt herself seized with still harsher violence and dragged afresh toward her danger, she understood it all in a great sinister flash which blasted her soul with terror. "No, no, Giorgio! Let me go! Let me go! Another minute -listen, listen! Just a minute! I want to say!" She supplicated, mad with terror, getting herself free and hoping to make him wait, to put him off with pity. "A minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me! Forgive me!" She stammered incoherent words, desperate, feeling herself overcome, losing her ground, seeing death close. "Murder!" she then yelled in her fury. And she defended herself with her nails, with her teeth, biting like a wild beast. "Murder!" she yelled, feeling herself seized by the hair, felled to the ground on the edge of the precipice, lost. The dog meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. The struggle was short and ferocious, as between implacable enemies who had been nursing to this hour in the depth of their souls an intensity of hate. And they plunged into death locked together.'

The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which they have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, the resort from far and wide of the physically afflicted, the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the description of whose unimaginable miseries and ecstasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the mark of a pictorial energy for such matters not inferior to that of

Émile Zola-to the degree even that the originality of the pages in question was, if I remember rightly, rather sharply impugned in Paris. D'Annunzio's defence, however, was easy, residing as it does in the fact that to handle any subject successfully handled by Zola (his failures are another matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to leave little margin for passing round them. To which I may add that, though the judgment may appear odd, the truth and force of the young man's few abject days at Guardiagrele, his casa paterna, are such as to make us wish that other such corners of life were more frequent in the author's pages. He has the supremely interesting quality in the novelist that he fixes, as it were, the tone of every cluster of objects he approaches, fixes it by the conIn The sistency and intensity of his reproduction.

Virgins of the Rocks' we have also a casa paterna, and a thing, as I have indicated, of exquisite and wonderful tone; but the tone here is of poetry, the truth and the force are less measurable and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, in its refined and attenuated form, is still that of sexual pursuit, which keeps it within the writer's too frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in Il Trionfo,' lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and made him the heir of his fortune, and one of the nephew's most frequent and faithful loyalties is to hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowledge of the dead man's act, put before us always with its accompaniment of loud southern resonance and confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the room, at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision.

'He heard, in the stillness of the air and of his arrested soul, the small shrill of an insect in the wainscot. And the little fact sufficed to dissipate for the moment the extreme violence of his nervous tension, as the puncture of a needle suffices to empty a swollen bladder. Every particular of the terrible day came back to his memory: the news abruptly brought to Torretta di Sarsa, toward three in the afternoon, by a panting messenger who stammered and whimpered; the ride on horseback, at lightning speed, under the canicular sky and up the torrid slopes, and, during the rush, the sudden faintnesses that turned him dizzy in his saddle; then the

house at home, filled with sobs, filled with a noise of doors slamming in the general scare, filled with the strumming of his own arteries; and at last his irruption into the room, the sight of the corpse, the curtains inflated and rustling, the tinkle on the wall of the little font for holy water.'

This young man's great mistake, we are told, had been his insistence on regarding love as a form of enjoyment. He would have been in a possible relation to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the heroine of Il Fuoco,' who suffers indeed, as it seems to us, so much more than is involved in the occasion. We ask ourselves continually why; that is, we do so at first; we do so before the special force of the book takes us captive and reduces us to mere charmed absorption of its successive parts, without question of its moral sense. Its defect is, verily, that it has no moral sense proportionate to the truth, the constant high style of the general picture; and this fact makes the whole thing appear given us simply because it has happened, because it was material that the author had become possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic actuality,' it has any large meaning. We get the impression of a direct transfer, a 'lift,' bodily, of something seen and known, something not really produced by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function. Their meaning here, at any rate, extracted with difficulty, would seem to be that there is an inevitable leak, as it were, of felicity when a mistress happens to be considerably older than her lover; but even this interesting, yet not unfamiliar, truth loses itself in the great poetic, pathetic, psychologic ceremonial.

That matters little indeed, as I say, while we read; the two sensibilities concerned bloom, in all the Venetian glow, like wondrous water-plants, throwing out branches and flowers of which we admire the fantastic growth even while we remain, botanically speaking, vague. They are other sensibilities than those with which we ourselves have community-one of the main reasons of their appearing so I shall presently explain; and, besides, they are isolated, sequestrated, according to D'Annunzio's constant view of such cases, for an exclusive, an intensified